The “special operation” launched by Putin on February 24, 2022, eight years after the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Donbass, helped to forge Ukraine. This former Soviet republic was indeed one of the last to proclaim its independence, on August 24, 1991. “At that date, we weren’t very sure that Ukraine was a nation. Now it’s done.” underlines the editorial of the journal The storywhich devotes a very rich file to Ukraine and the consequences of the return of the war in Europe.
Memorial battles had begun long before the war began, and they remain central. In a dense interview, Nicolas Werth, specialist on the USSR and president of the French branch of the NGO Memorial, analyzes Vladimir Putin’s rewriting of a national novel, increasingly centered around the Great Patriotic War, which, with its 20 million deaths, remains the last and only unifying myth. “It makes anti-Nazism a kind of DNA of the Russian people”, notes the historian, denouncing a rewriting of history and the absurdity of the reason invoked for this war (the “denazification” of Ukraine), even though, despite the ambiguities, even the collaboration, of a part of Ukrainian nationalism with the Nazis, “the vast majority of Ukrainians fought in the ranks of the Red Army”.
Stimulating evocations
Masha Cerovic, who devoted a noted book to Soviet partisans (Stalin’s Children, Threshold, 2018), shows how “the history of violence against civilians in the wars of the USSR, then of Russia, since 1939 can shed light on the ongoing conflict”. Sabine Dullin, meanwhile, tries to understand why the Russian army, which was the pillar of the tsarist empire and then of the USSR, today shows so many weaknesses. The modernization launched in 2008 has not been completed. It is a two-speed army, with high-tech, special forces and hybrid warfare on one side, and the great mass of soldiers on the other, “a Soviet relic framed by paramilitaries and mercenaries ready for all abuses”.
Ukraine’s long history is not forgotten, with two stimulating evocations of the past of regions that are today among the most contested, that of Kharkiv, in the northeast, studied by Yuliia Koniva, while Meryl Lavenant recounts the Russification of the northern shores of the Black Sea after their conquest by Catherine II in the 18th centurye century. A specialist in the history of war, Bruno Cabanes looks back on international criminal justice and its rise to power, analyzing the issues around the legal qualification of the crimes committed, many of which are documented live. In her contribution, Annette Wieviorka, a specialist in the history and memory of the Holocaust, recalls what efforts had been made in the same regions to collect evidence of the extermination of the Jews during the Second World War.
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